Yes and no. Case law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_law) is one of the most powerful tools to defend yourself in court. Obviously you can't be reporting a judicial decision taken in Iran to sue a group of homosexuals and kill them, but the thing is that you can refer to previous judicial decisions if sued in a court within the European union. In fact in this judicial process the lawyer referred to similar binding precedents in the Netherlands. I'm not quite sure about how the legal system works there in the US but I guess that citing previous sentences of EU's courts can be of certain help when sued for something as ridiculous as this (i'm not 100% certain about this tho).
Source: I'm Spanish and the SGAE (equivalent for the american RIAA in Spain) is always on the newspapers' frontpage for such idiotic things...